Diversity, Inclusion, and "Othering": Methodologies for Comparative Literature (original) (raw)

2021, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée

The Task of the Comparatist Comparative Literature has remained an elusive discipline of inquiry, as it has been perceived as "a subject of study, a general approach to literature, a series of specific methods of literary history, a return to a medieval way of thought, a methodological credo for the day, an administrative annoyance, a new wrinkle in university organization," and much more (Weisinger and Joyaux vii). Amidst these infinite possibilities, a comparatist must identify the key responsibilities of the discipline as a field of intellectual inquiry. The difficulty in defining the field, or at least the difficulty in coming to an agreement about the definition, is not essentially a crisis for the discipline. The field can and has accommodated the study of a wide range of literary works from a varied geographical, historical, linguistic backgrounds and engaged with other disciplinary modes of inquiry. Scholars have argued that the search for definition is ultimately a futile exercise for a field that resists categorization of knowledge into discipline-specific fields of inquiry. For example, Haun Saussy has shown that scholarly attempts in defining Comparative Literature "through its objects of knowledge or methods" remain inefficacious, and proposes to understand the discipline "as practice, a way of constructing objects" (340). Harry Levin, one of the founders of the discipline in the North American context, characterizes it as "an attempt to pool the resources of the variously related literature, to cross the linguistic barriers that confine them within the framework of national histories and provide an area for the consideration of their common features and underlying forces" (22). Levin's proposed attempt to transcend the boundaries of national histories in the study of literature has been echoed in the works of René Wellek, another founding figure of the American school of Comparative Literature,